


l'appel du vide

by penhaligon



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Void God Billie
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-07 10:33:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14669249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penhaligon/pseuds/penhaligon
Summary: 1. AU:He sees many worlds, cracks halted in some, cracks spreading in others, and paths diverge within them like the branches of a fabled tree of life.No matter which path you walk, your footsteps stir the waters of the Void, rippling outward and carrying change on the crests of each wave.2. Canon compliant:"What do you want, Billie Lurk?"





	l'appel du vide

**Author's Note:**

> Loved playing DOTO because Billie >>> but it should have been about Billie becoming the next void god (or not). So, part one is a 2nd-person AU exploring different potential endings based on this concept, and part two is a 3rd-person canon compliant post-game exploration of how Billie might get there regardless.

The Outsider watches you, watches the twisted Void-touched knots of time and space and fate and choice tremble around you and yearn. It is like nothing he's left in his wake. His web sprawls from Marked to Marked and beyond, multiplying upon itself exponentially, but what surrounds you is a singularity, a density so heavy with the weight of all things that it is only a matter of time before something gives. Before the cracks spreading from it shatter the thin veneer of reality and allow the Void's all-consuming hunger into the world it beats against like a high tide.

So the Outsider gives you a Void-touched arm and a Void-touched eye, and the tide is stemmed, but only just. The knot of time and space around you stills, but only in the manner of a deep breath. The Void is waiting, and so is the Outsider, to see what you will do.

He sees many worlds, cracks halted in some, cracks spreading in others, and paths diverge within them like the branches of a fabled tree of life.

No matter which path you walk, your footsteps stir the waters of the Void, rippling outward and carrying change on the crests of each wave.

* * *

In one world, you listen to Daud's talk of deicide, and you don't know what to think. You don't necessarily disagree. A better world is one without power, without people wielding it and distributing it on the basis of their own whims and desires and with no care for the spiderweb of cause and effect that follows. But this is not that world, and you are tired of blood and knives and death, and you don't know what it will fix. You don't think anything can fix this world.

But you go along with it because you owe Daud, and you don't care for the Outsider's methods anyway. A sense of purpose feels good, feels right, and it galvanizes you more than eking out a day-to-day living on a rusty boat that's always falling apart and now sits leaking and dying. A fire is lit under you, and no longer does a detached sort of cynicism beat fruitlessly against a hollow numbness in your chest, when you see rotten thing after rotten thing.

There are cultists draining blood from people who won't be missed, and wealthy wringing and hoarding every last bit of assets from those under their boots, and clergy taking and destroying what they please in the name of piety. You hate them all with a fervor that surprises you, but old regrets sit ever-present in the back of your mind and stay a hand that would not regret eliminating them. They don't deserve to live, but you know the chain of cause and effect too well by now, and you know that sometimes the deaths of those who deserve it lead to the suffering of those who don't.

So you kill only when you need to as you make your way through the festering underbelly of Karnaca, as rats whisper to you with Deirdre's voice, and the fire lit under you burns bright.

You see cracks in reality now visible, hollow fissures that whisper strange things, and you get the sense that the Void itself has been dogging your steps for a long time. Your dreams feel Void-touched, and when they stop, your black shard arm is powerful, and your unblinking red stone eye sees much. It feels good, you tell Daud. Like you were always meant to be not quite whole and yet so much more than that.

The Outsider follows you too, taking and restoring your eye and arm and whispering through cracks in the fabric of the world, from which the Void spills out like a leak in the Dreadful Wale. You don't know what he wants. He tells you that the Void calls to you, that the world sits uneasy and fractured around you, that you and he are the same.

 _I'm here because you are different,_ he says. _The Void has found you through the cracks in your broken life._ _And when you cut me out of it, what will remain?_

He's cryptic and maddening, and you think that he probably deserves to have the twin-bladed knife shoved through his chest, but the same thoughts of cause and effect arrest the forward momentum that newfound purpose had given you. What _will_ remain? you ask yourself, standing in a bank vault with a Void-touched knife in your black shard hand as the Void hums wordlessly to you.

 _The world doesn't need more men like me,_ Daud had said, and that is true. The Outsider is no different from Daud, but you had once deserved a knife through your chest too, and maybe you still do. If someone had taken you out, taken Daud out all those years ago, it would have been justified, but you cannot say what the end result would have been. Would the world have been made better or worse or left just the same?

You press forward nonetheless, because Daud is dead, and you get the sense that the Outsider is asking something of you, and the Void's hum is now insistent and strong, though you don't know what it's saying. All you know is that going forward feels as right as your arm and eye, that some new version of you lies ahead. There have been many versions of you, daughter and Deirdre's and Whaler and Captain, but the Dreadful Wale burns with Daud's body like a pyre for them too, and you don't know what you are now.

You want to find out.

So you discover that the Mark is the Outsider's name, and the eye of a dead god looks at you like it's known you all your life, and you kill a creature of stone when you accidentally cross its trail of Void shards and dust. Along the way, the Outsider tells you that you have a choice, and the cracks in reality whisper of endings and futures with his voice, until finally, finally, you reach the heart of the Void.

A half-dead whale circles endlessly around a gigantic pillar of stone that rises up into infinity, with the sliver of a break near the surface of the infinite water that surrounds it. There, Daud's spirit lingers along with other sparking white ghosts that moan horrors and regrets if you get too close, and there, the Outsider waits.

You still don't know what the Void is, what kind of existence you inhabit when in it, but the clash of the knife the Outsider summons against yours is very, very solid. He strikes without warning, and he's as strong and as fast as you are. It's a jarring change from all the times he's appeared and whispered to you, from the seeming encouragement that had drawn you ever closer to the Void, and you find yourself going toe-to-toe with a god.

You don't understand why until you get an opening.

It's wide and inviting and far, far too easy, and all of a sudden you know, with a certainty you can't explain, that it's deliberate. That the Outsider wants you to kill him or at least to try. For a moment, you're tempted, if only to get this over with and remove at least one blight manipulating power in the world, but you don't. You pull back and let the opening pass, and the Outsider stays on the attack.

But another opening comes, and another, and finally, you take advantage of one. You twist your knife so that his is thrown wildly to one side, switch the twin-bladed knife to your left hand, and punch him in the face with your black shard right.

He goes reeling, and you stand there with the twin-bladed knife poised but still. "This is a test," you spit out.

The Outsider straightens and smiles, neither pleasant nor warm, and for a moment, you hate him. You hate the smug way he talks and the callous way he toys with lives by putting his black magic out in the world just to see the ripple effect it has on everything around his Marked.

"You haven't killed me yet," he says, and his own knife vanishes from his hands. As if inviting you to. "Why?"

"I figure you'd have a broken nose if I could," you say. You're now certain that whatever this is before you, this specter or projection, isn't the part of him that can be killed.

The Outsider only gazes at you like he can see everything in your head, and it doesn't look like he believes that answer. You don't, either. But the Outsider turns, stepping back and clearing a path for you, and you're suddenly aware of something that wasn't there before, resting at the very center of the place. A stone slab with a body trapped inside, half-emerged from it like a drowning man trying to escape a whirlpool.

The Outsider chooses this moment, of all moments, to stay silent. But you step forward towards the slab with the tip of the twin-bladed knife dipping down, and you find that you don't need him to explain the situation before you. You know, with a certainty granted by the Void.

Does he want you to kill him or free him? You get the sense that it doesn't matter.

He just wants out.

The Void hums all around you, almost unbearably loud, and a cold presence is at your left. A ghostly hand brushes over the flesh of your arm there, coming to rest against the twin-bladed knife. _End it, Billie,_ Daud's voice says, a thousand whispers of every point of his life speaking as one.

"He lived and breathed once," you say. "He had a name. It's the Mark." You turn to Daud, to his spirit shimmering beside you. "Only the dead can read it."

Daud flickers like candlelight, like only a breath would make him dissipate. _Don't ask me to do this. He doesn't deserve forgiveness._

"Maybe not," you say. "But neither did I, and you gave me a chance. Let me do the same for someone else."

Daud's cold presence leaves the knife and your arm. _No,_ he says, and for a moment, you think you're going to lose no matter how much you argue, that you're going to shove the knife into the Outsider's chest even though you're sick of killing. But Daud's eyes are sorrowful and warm. _You're better than I was. For you..._

He walks to the slab and whispers the Outsider's name, and the Void trembles.

 _Farewell, Billie,_ Daud's voice says as his body disintegrates, swallowed by light. _For the last time. The rest is up to you._

Then he's gone, and your heart aches so fiercely that for a moment you think you might disintegrate with him. But you turn as a crack resounds, and you see that a spiderweb of fault lines now covers the Outsider's stone body. When you look behind you, the Outsider's specter is gone, and you know what you have to do.

You switch the twin-bladed knife to your black shard arm and strike at the stone behind him. The knife sinks deep in a way that no normal knife could pierce normal stone. You shove and saw, and the slab and the Void shudder. In one moment, it resists as fiercely as if you were under a thousand tons of water, so much that you can hardly move your arm, and in the next moment, it's as if the Void is helping you along, pushing the knife with its own will. Back and forth you saw, and the Void helps and hinders, until at last, another crack resonates, in the stone and in the air and deep within your mind.

The Outsider stumbles forward, chips of stone falling off of him like snow and revealing flesh underneath, and you catch him with your left arm. Even though he sags, lifting him is nothing; it's as if newfound strength surges through you, as if the Void is still pouring itself into your movements.

For a moment, the Outsider merely hangs off of your arm and stares down at the ground in shock, until he gets his feet under him and stands slowly, stiffly. You let your arm fall, watching him.

He watches you in turn. Though he looks a little punch-drunk, and the lines of his face don't flicker and seem quite so ageless anymore, he's still irritatingly composed. "You have a choice, Billie Lurk," he says again.

"That _wasn't_ my choice?" you ask, even though you already have a sense of what he's talking about. You can hardly hear him over the humming of the Void in your ears. You think it must be rushing through your blood too. It grasps at you, grasps deep, and you know you can't stay here much longer before it subsumes you entirely.

"The rest is up to you," the Outsider echoes. "The Void has always hungered. It wants what we all want. To _be_." He shrugs. "If not you, it will choose someone else, in time. It always does, whether they want it or not. But the choice is yours this time."

"You knew," you say, and you think it'd be nice to punch him again. You can see it clearly now, through all of his cryptic encouragement, his gift of the arm and the eye. You think that perhaps it wouldn't have been so easy to cut him out of the Void had a replacement not been primed nearby. "The whole time." There's the tiniest hint of something contrite in his face. Good. "What will happen if I say no?"

"Nothing," the Outsider says. "The world has been irreparably cracked open, but the damage has not spread to the breaking point. Perhaps it soon will; perhaps it never will. But that will not be because of your rejection."

"And what cracked it?" you ask, glaring.

"Your displacement in time was... a catalyst," the Outsider says lightly, but you hear the beat of hesitation, and you think that things found a way of circling around for him too. Actions and reactions, until they rebounded back on the very fabric of the world. "But the process of the Void finding its way into the physical world started long before I ever existed."

The two of you stand there, discussing matters of reality at the heart of all things like sailors discuss the sea, while the Void crescendos within you, cajoling and insistent. It would be so easy to give in, you think. Easy and not all bad, perhaps. There is little left behind you and uncertainty ahead. You could _do_ something with this. Something more than deicide.

You know the chain of cause and effect too well by now, but is it something you want to shackle yourself to even more?

You think about the Mark, Daud's arcane bond and the Whalers, Delilah and her witches, the Empress and the Royal Protector and all those disrupting the waters of the world with too much power over its ebb and flow, and you shake your head.

"It stops here," you say, and the Void thrums, discordant. "At least for now."

There might be another down the road, but if it took this much effort for the Void to seek you out, then perhaps that won't be for a long time. The world might even cease before then, sucked into the Void's all-consuming ravenous maw, and you get the feeling that no one can stop that inevitability. But who are you to take that power for yourself in the meantime, after everything you've done? How do you know that it won't consume you too? It did once before.

You think you're rejecting something that you've felt for longer than you can remember. As if you've pushed aside a version of you that you've been on the path towards for a long time. But that is your right. There are other yous waiting somewhere ahead.

The Void swirls around you, pressing in, and you catch glimpses of things far beyond your understanding. It could be within your understanding, the Void seems to tell you. So much could be yours, an existence that you and you alone could walk. Could do anything with. But you push back firmly, and it retreats, reluctant. Not gone, though. You feel it still, in your eye, your arm, the back of your mind. Too much a part of you now.

The Outsider stares at you.

"Did you know this would happen?" you ask.

He shakes his head. "I didn't know what you would choose, Billie Lurk. But perhaps the world is better off with you in it."

You take a look at your surroundings - at the sloping stone around you, at the hazy vastness of gray nothingness through which the shadow of a great whale no longer undulates. Less defined than it was before, perhaps fading away slowly. Losing its shape, now. Waiting for someone or something to define it. To help it be. But you will not be that person. You hope that no one will for a long time.

Then you look down at your black shard arm, observing the way it glimmers in the sight of your unblinking stone eye.

"I'm keeping these," you say, looking up.

The Void does not disagree. You get the sense that it favors you even now. That it will always be a part of you, always whispering in the back of your mind, resonating through your arm and your eye, attempting to lure you back into its embrace. But you trust in your ability to resist it until your dying day and beyond. After all, you are able to turn it away at its heart. You hope that your trust in yourself is not misplaced.

The Outsider is still difficult to read, but you think he's almost impressed. You like him a little bit more.

"Come on," you say, banishing the twin-bladed knife and offering him your black shard hand. "Let's get out of here."

* * *

In one world, the two of you stand there, discussing matters of reality at the heart of all things like sailors discuss the sea, while the Void crescendos within you, cajoling and insistent. It would be so easy to give in, you think. Easy and not all bad, perhaps. There is little left behind you and uncertainty ahead. You could  _do_  something with this. Something more than deicide.

You know the chain of cause and effect too well by now, and you know the way it usually goes. Someone gets their hands on power, over others, over their environment, and it doesn't go well for anyone else.

You think of all that you've done to make the world a worse place, what you did to Daud, to the Empress, and you wonder how much you've actually done to make up for it. Was it ever enough? Is _this_ enough? How can you know for sure? How can you know what leaving the Void empty and unchecked will do?

"Okay," you say, and the Void thrums, melodious. "It stops here."

There might be another down the road, but you don't know who that will be, or when. You don't know if the world will cease before then, sucked into the Void's all-consuming ravenous maw, and you get the feeling that no one can stop that inevitability. Who are you to take that power for yourself in the meantime, after everything you've done? But who are those after you? Who is anyone who reaches out to the Void with greed and desperation, not understanding what they call upon? Where does it stop?

With you. That's what you can do with this.

You don't know if you could stop the Void from twisting you, if you used it in the way the Outsider had. It did once before. But you trust yourself enough to resist that temptation and to act as a buffer instead. To put a stop to it all. To prolong the time until another, perhaps worse than you, assumes that power, and to stop the unchecked spill of Void into the world from growing worse. No more Marked. No more using the Void as clerical excuse and foundation for Empire. You will see to that.

And perhaps you can calm the Void, mend some of the cracks, give the world a little more time that it doesn't really deserve.

You think this is what you've felt for longer than you can remember. As if you've been on a path towards this version of you all along. It makes the decision easy.

The Void rushes in gladly, merging with every aspect of your being, and you feel a settling and a snap in your gut, as if something monumental has just been etched in stone. Your unblinking eye looks farther than it ever has, to the singular point that was the beginning and the singular point that will be the end, when all is inevitably drawn back. Time and space are in flux between, gravity and choice shaping all between hammer and anvil, lines of fate and chance tangling together and winking in and out of existence. All of a sudden, you understand what the Void is.

_Everything._

And you understand how someone can go mad or become callous and cold, looking at it. But you look without fear, because your life has taught you how to look without flinching. Your black shard arm pulses with power, there for the using. You won't, not yet. The chain of cause and effect is all too evident before your eyes.

But maybe, maybe, you can reach out and help one day, once you've learned to read the lines of fate and chance clearly enough that you can mitigate whatever rebound it has.

You wonder if that was once the Outsider's line of thinking.

The Outsider stares at you.

"Did you know this would happen?" you ask. Your voice doesn't sound any different to your ears, and you wonder what he sees.

He shakes his head. "I didn't know what you would choose, Billie Lurk. But you chose this willingly. Perhaps the Void will be kinder as a result."

You take a look at your surroundings and find that the pillar of stone and the infinite water has disappeared. The center of all things is hazy, undefined, all light and infinite space that is no color at all. The Void waits for you to give it a shape, a definition. You hope that it will be kinder indeed. That your trust in yourself is not misplaced. You think that maybe it isn't. You've stayed your hand this whole bloody mission, after all.

Then you look down at your black shard arm, observing the way it glimmers in the sight of your unblinking stone eye. You could appear any way you wish, you realize. You could get your original arm and eye back.

"I'm keeping these," you say, looking up. "They look good."

The Outsider is still difficult to read, but you think you see the hint of amusement on his face. You like him a little bit more.

You banish the twin-bladed knife and offer him your black shard hand. "I'll send you back," you say, and your next words are a promise. "You'll be alright."

* * *

In another world, you go along with it because you owe Daud, and you don't care for the Outsider's methods anyway. A sense of purpose feels good, feels right, and it galvanizes you more than eking out a day-to-day living on a rusty boat that's always falling apart and now sits leaking and dying. A fire is lit under you, and no longer does a detached sort of cynicism beat fruitlessly against a hollow numbness in your chest, when you see rotten thing after rotten thing.

There are cultists draining blood from people who won't be missed, and wealthy wringing and hoarding every last bit of assets from those under their boots, and clergy taking and destroying what they please in the name of piety. You hate them all with a fervor that surprises you, and though old regrets sit ever-present in the back of your mind, your hand slips somewhere in a club where these people make a game of it, impelled by a burst of anger at the sight of a half-dead brother and a misstep that gets you spotted on the top floor.

When you are finished there, you tell yourself that they didn't deserve to live. You know the chain of cause and effect too well by now, and you know that sometimes the deaths of those who deserve it lead to the suffering of those who don't, but the brother is safe, and hopefully this may stem the tide of cultists in Karnaca and put the fear of the Void into them.

Rats whisper to you with Deirdre's voice as you make your way through Karnaca's festering underbelly, and you kill again. And again. You don't intend to, at first, but it's a little easier with magic, with blood already on your hands, with excuses. You need the money from contracts that ask you to kill. You need to protect someone else, here and there. You need to get through this unscathed or undetected. You start lose sight of future consequences in favor of the immediate. The fire lit under you burns out quickly, leaving you spent, exhausted.

Sometimes you think you hear a crack like melting ice in the air around you, and you see widening, hollow fissures in reality now visible to you, from which the Void spills out like a leak in the Dreadful Wale. You get the sense that the Void itself has been dogging your steps for a long time. Your dreams feel Void-touched, and when they stop, your black shard arm is powerful, and your unblinking red stone eye sees much. It feels good, you tell Daud. Like you were always meant to be not quite whole and yet so much more than that.

The Outsider follows you too, taking and restoring your eye and arm and whispering through the cracks in the fabric of the world. You don't know what he wants. He tells you that the Void calls to you, that the world sits uneasy and fractured around you, that you and he are the same. You get the sense that he is trying to sway you, but towards what, you do not know.

 _I'm here because you are different,_  he says.  _The Void has found you through the cracks in your broken life._   _And when you cut me out of it, what will remain?_

He's cryptic and maddening, and you think that he probably deserves to have the twin-bladed knife shoved through his chest, but you stop to listen for a moment or two. What  _will_  remain? you ask yourself, standing in a bank vault with a Void-touched knife in your black shard hand as the Void hums wordlessly to you.

 _The world doesn't need more men like me,_  Daud had said, and that is true. The Outsider is no different from Daud, but you had once deserved a knife through your chest too, and maybe you still do. If someone had taken you out, taken Daud out all those years ago, it would have been justified.

You press forward, because Daud is dead, and the Outsider's words to you are darker and colder, spilling out of the hollow cracks in reality like poison, and the Void's hum is now insistent and strong, though you don't know what it's saying. All you know is that going forward feels inevitable, that some new version of you lies ahead. There have been many versions of you, daughter and Deirdre's and Whaler and Captain, but the Dreadful Wale burns with Daud's body like a pyre for them too, dissipating all of your ties to the world, and you don't know what you are now.

You need to find out.

So you discover that the Mark is the Outsider's name, and the eye of a dead god looks at you like it's known you all your life, and you kill a score of cultists and a creature of stone when you accidentally cross its trail of Void shards and dust. Along the way, the Outsider tells you that you have a choice, and the cracks in reality whisper of catastrophes and revelations with his voice, until finally, finally, you reach the heart of the Void.

A half-dead whale circles endlessly around a gigantic pillar of stone that rises up into infinity, with the sliver of a break near the surface of the infinite water that surrounds it. There, Daud's spirit lingers along with other sparking white ghosts that moan horrors and regrets if you get too close, and there, the Outsider waits.

You still don't know what the Void is, what kind of existence you inhabit when in it, but the clash of the knife the Outsider summons against yours is very, very solid. He strikes without warning, and he's as strong and as fast as you are. His face is as cold as the words he's whispered to you, and you find yourself going toe-to-toe with a god.

He's trying to stop you, and at points, you think he's going to. It's the hardest fight of your life, but you are tired and angry, and there's blood on your hands and the Void thrumming in your ears, louder and more painful. You feel as if some great weight settles in you, some shivering point condensed within your chest, twisting the very air around you into a knot. It makes your blows harder and stronger than his, and finally, you twist your knife so that the Outsider's is thrown wildly to one side and wrap your arms around him, bringing the tip of the twin-bladed knife to his throat.

You don't think he expects it.

You hesitate, and the form of the Outsider begins to vibrate and flicker, and all of a sudden, you know with certainty that this specter or projection isn't the part of him that can be killed.

It begins to dissipate in your grip, as if strengthened by your hesitation, but the damage is done. You catch a glimpse of that sparking white, of Daud's ghostly form moving, and you're suddenly aware of something that wasn't there before, resting at the very center of the place. A stone slab with a body trapped inside, half-emerged from it like a drowning man trying to escape a whirlpool. You know, with that same inexplicable certainty, that Daud has pulled back the veil while the Outsider's attention was elsewhere, that you have seconds to move before it slams back down into place.

 _End it, Billie,_ Daud's voice whispers, cold and barely audible over the manic humming of the Void all around you, a thousand whispers of every point of his life speaking as one.

You hesitate again, and it's as if the Void is screaming in your ears. You look at the form of the Outsider encased in stone, and you hate him, then. You hate the smug way he talks and the callous way he toys with lives by putting his black magic out in the world just to see the ripple effect it has on everything around his Marked. If you can remove at least one blight manipulating power in the world, then maybe this will all mean something. You've seen what he wanted you to see, and all you've seen is a rotten, death-filled world that never seems to get any better.

 _The world doesn't need more men like me,_ Daud had said.

You shove aside the specter, which stumbles and flickers and disappears, and then you stride forward and shove the twin-bladed knife into the stone form's chest.

It goes in like no normal knife could pierce normal stone, and a crack resounds. A spiderweb of fault lines expands over the Outsider's stone body. They vibrate and then shatter outward, and the Void groans as a lifeless body of flesh falls at your feet, staring up at the gray nothingness above.

Another crack resounds, and another, like ice melting and thread snapping, in the air and in your mind. Your body feels strong, stronger than ever, as if the Void itself is pouring into you, and its hum is a roar, now.

 _You have a choice, Billie Lurk,_ someone whispers. Someone who sounds like the Outsider and Daud and Empress Jessamine and Deirdre and none of them all at once.

 _It's done,_ Daud's voice says, and you look up to find his ghost flickering gray and black.

You can hardly hear any of it over the sound of the Void in your ears. You think it must be rushing through your blood too. It grasps at you, grasps deep, and you know that you can't stay here much longer before it subsumes you entirely.

 _You cut away the knot at the center,_ Daud says.

But you know, with that growing, agonizing certainty, that you didn't. The knot is you, and the lines and threads of the Void pulse around you and within you. Your unblinking eye catches glimpses of things that you can barely understand, but it is enough to know what you have done. There are cracks around you now, like the ones out there in the physical world, jagged wounds in reality growing ever wider and screaming in your head. The screams of all things. Everything, existing at once.

The Void is a tide, and it doesn't retreat. Not without something to stay its hand. Once, perhaps, it might have existed without that for some time, but you did not stay your hand in turn, and now you know that the Void has been with you for longer than you can remember, that your actions have reverberated outward every time the magic of your black shard arm struck outwards instead of holding steady.

The cracks are too big, too unstable now. They won't stop growing on their own, not after you hammered them so. The damage is beyond the breaking point.

You can feel the Void's hunger, its desire to _be_ , and without something to hold it back, it will reach forward into the physical world to satisfy that desire and never be satisfied.

There is only one person left who can hold it back.

You banish the twin-bladed knife and reach out with your black shard hand - to what, you don't know, but the Void reaches back, cajoling and insistent and greedy. There is nothing left behind you, and nothing ahead, if it isn't stopped. You know the chain of cause and effect all too well now.

"No," you say, and the Void thrums, melodious. "It stops here."

 _Billie?_  Daud's voice whispers. His form is fast fading. He doesn't understand it like you do now.

The world doesn't deserve it, but neither had you, and yet you'd been given a second chance. It would be so easy to let the Void loose, to let one world collapse in on itself and another burst forth, to let it all start over, but you take the Void into you instead.

You think this is what you've felt for longer than you can remember. As if you've been on a path towards this version of you all along.

The Void rushes in gladly, merging with every aspect of your being, and you feel a settling and a snap in your gut, as if something monumental has just been etched in stone. Your unblinking eye looks farther than it ever has, to the singular point that was the beginning and the singular point that will be the end, when all is inevitably drawn back. Time and space are in flux between, gravity and choice shaping all between hammer and anvil, lines of fate and chance tangling together and winking in and out of existence.

You know what the Void is now. It is everything, and in the sight of your unblinking eye, everything bends under the weight of itself, weakened by the spiderweb cracks flaring out from its heart. A heart that is still gray and hazy, ill-defined lines of stone and water shimmering as if they, too, will fade. The whale is gone, and the spirits are gone. The Outsider's glassy-eyed body at your feet fades, and you watch as Daud's ghost vanishes last like black dust. Your heart aches so fiercely that for a moment you think you might disintegrate with him.

You think of all that you've done to make the world a worse place, what you did to Daud, to the Empress, and you wonder if this last mercy will make up for it.

The world will cease one day, sucked into the Void's all-consuming ravenous maw, and no one can stop that inevitability. Not the Outsider. Not you. You wonder if the Void will twist you, consume you in the meantime, as it has before. It feels like another inevitability.

But you can stall it for a while.

* * *

In another world, the Void is a tide, and it doesn't retreat. Not without something to stay its hand. Once, perhaps, it might have existed without that for some time, but you did not stay your hand in turn, and now you know that the Void has been with you for longer than you can remember, that your actions have reverberated outward every time the magic of your black shard arm struck outwards instead of holding steady.

The cracks are too big, too unstable now. They won't stop growing on their own, not after you hammered them so. The damage is beyond the breaking point.

You can feel the Void's hunger, its desire to  _be_ , and without something to hold it back, it will reach forward into the physical world to satisfy that desire and never be satisfied.

There is only one person left who can hold it back.

But why should that person be you? The Void has already twisted you before. It will only twist you further, and what good will that do? What ruin will that bring?

Ruin is already here.

You clutch the twin-bladed knife with black shard fingers like a vice as you listen to the Void, cajoling and insistent and greedy. It doesn't care which one it takes. You or the world. And it will take you and twist you, in the end. Now or down the road. It always does. Does it matter when? There is nothing left behind you and nothing ahead.

 _Billie?_  Daud's voice whispers. His form is fast fading. He doesn't understand it like you do now.

You look down at the Outsider's body, his glassy eyes staring up at the gray nothingness above, and you remember a girl with a crushed skull in a dirty street. The world doesn't deserve it, you think, sick to your stomach. You are tired and angry, and there is blood on your hands and the Void thrumming in your ears, louder and more painful. You know now that if the Void is let loose, one world will collapse in on itself and another will burst forth. It will all start over. A clean slate. The only way your bloodied hands can fix a world that can't be fixed.

"It stops here," you say, and the Void thrums, ravenous. All of it stops, at last. Perhaps the new world will be better. Kinder.

The Void swirls around you, widening each fissure and crack now spreading too fast to follow, and you don't accept it. You don't stop the tide. You shut out its screaming and let it rush around you instead, watching the fabric of reality snap and unravel, cut by rows of black teeth. Everything bends under the weight of itself, weakened by the spiderweb cracks flaring out from its heart, and then breaks.

And the Void swallows all.


End file.
